There Is No Freedom Without Responsibility
"We cannot attack that people, for it is stronger than us.” – Numbers 13:31
We came to the land you sent us to; it does indeed flow with milk and honey, and this is its fruit. However, the people who inhabit the country are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large… We cannot attack that people, for it is stronger than us. – Numbers 13:27-31
The scene boggles the mind: trapped inside a classroom with a man-child murderer with a gun, a wounded teacher manages to call her husband asking for help. The murderer’s gun shots can be heard in the hallway outside the classroom, where armed cops in body armor stand on the other side of an unlocked door. Yet for more than an hour they do nothing.
There are so many things to say about this that nothing is probably the best thing to say.
What perhaps hurts most is the responsibility not taken by those who posed as leaders. For to put oneself forward as a cop is to make two claims: that you will try to enforce the law, and that you will put yourself at risk in order to protect the community from a common threat.
The failure of the policemen in Uvalde was a failure to live up to their chosen responsibility.
The above Biblical passage describes a similar group of leaders. Chosen by Moses at God’s command as “princes” of each of the twelve tribes, they were sent to “scope out” the promised land.
There are famous debates regarding why God would command them to go ahead and report on the territory the children of Israel were meant to inhabit. It was understood, after all, that Israel’s victory over the peoples of the land was to be won by God, who had defeated Egypt with His plagues and the waters of His sea. Indeed, the land was eventually captured in miraculous fashion, the walls of Jericho falling at the sound of the shofar of Joshua’s army. Since Israel had no need to gather intelligence on a place that would be conquered for them by God, wouldn’t these “spies” be nothing more than an opportunity for Israel to find a reason to be fearful of entering the land?
Leaving these questions to the side, the story told is one of a profound failure of leadership. Finding a land that both flowed with milk and honey and that was inhabited by giants, all but two of these chosen leaders chose to focus on what they saw as the impossibility of the task ahead instead of the opportunity it presented.
Their report sowed fear among the children of Israel of what awaited them if they tried to conquer the land, and they lapsed once again into a familiar despair, believing that even now, after they had been freed from Egypt, crossed the sea and the desert, survived by eating manna that appeared each morning, and heard the voice of God Himself at Mount Sinai, that they would be left defenseless and so defeated by their adversaries. Even still, they, who had of all people in all human history been given the most reason to believe, did not believe. Instead, they demanded a return back to slavery in Egypt, for which God gave them forty years in the desert.
None of those involved—who have seen My Presence and the signs that I have performed in Egypt and in the wilderness, and who have tried Me these ten times and have disobeyed Me shall see the land that I promised on oath to their fathers; none of those who spurn Me shall see it. – Numbers 14:22-23
So, at the edge of the desert and the freedom of the land, Israel was sent back into the prison of the wilderness.
The message: when leadership fails to take responsibility, freedom is lost.
Perhaps no message is better suited to our own time. For in the past two years we have seen a failure to take responsibility not only by police officers in Uvalde, Texas but from self-styled leaders from every neighborhood and in every town in America and many other parts of the world. Whether doctors following corrupt orders, politicians claiming powerlessness over the institutions they were elected to govern, leaders of business following the latest slogans no matter how racist or radical, spiritual leaders shutting down their places of worship, or reporters repeating a propagandistic line, many and great have been the examples of those who have simultaneously claimed leadership while avoiding its responsibility.
What has been the result? In the gap left by failed leaders have appeared opportunists of all types and temperaments, hoping to profit off circumstances or empower themselves at the cost of the powerless. Which has led in the self-styled land of the free to an extraordinary contraction of freedom. Where once the right to protest or speak your mind on any topic was held sacrosanct, these rights are now castigated and condemned or even the basis of prosecution when used by those who do not speak the line endorsed by the powerful. Suddenly the ability even to return to one’s country, eat in a restaurant, work in a job, be educated in a school, or watch a play without either wearing a face covering, being subject to a disease screen, or participating in a medical experiment has slipped away.
If leadership that abdicates responsibility reduces freedom, leadership that embraces responsibility secures liberty.
One of the great scenes of English literature closes The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Having finally returned to the Shire victorious from the long and terrible War of the Ring, the four hobbits Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin find a gate barring their entrance on the far side of the Brandywine river. In place of the comforting inn they were expecting, they spend the night in a barracks for corrupt hobbits, a “mean and ugly place” filled with “little rows of hard beds” where “on every wall there was a notice and a list of Rules.” The next day they come to Bywater, and
… there they had their first really painful shock. This was Frodo and Sam’s own country, and they found out now that they cared about it more than any other place in the world. Many of the houses that they had known were missing. Some seemed to have burned down. The pleasant row of old hobbit-holes in the bank on the north side of the Pool were deserted, and their little gardens that used to run down bright to the water’s edge were rank with weeds.
A couple of hundred men, led by the once formidable Saruman, have taken control of the Shire, bullying its peaceful hobbits into a pained submission while living roughly off the land’s spoils.
The four returning hobbits by now, however, have seen far greater perils, and know how to rouse a force to fight a battle, and how to win it once it has been started. More importantly, their great adventure has cured them fully of the temptation to avoid the terrible responsibility that must be taken: to fight when necessary, even risking their own lives and the lives of those around them in order to restore freedom to their own piece of the world.
Read a certain way, it can sound sentimental, or even false. But J.R.R. Tolkien was mining deeper passageways than that when he wrote those words, which carry the same message we read in the episode of Israel’s ten princes who brought an evil report about the good land they were meant to inherit.
In doing so, they set an everlasting example of how freedom lies just beyond the moment when leaders embrace their responsibility, no matter who frightening, fraught, or difficult it may be.